IT was a very hot summer, in August, 1904; and Florence had
already been taking the baths for a month. I don't know how it
feels to be a patient at one of those places. I never was a patient
anywhere. I daresay the patients get a home feeling and some sort
of anchorage in the spot. They seem to like the bath attendants,
with their cheerful faces, their air of authority, their white linen.
But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave me a sense--what shall I
say?--a sense almost of nakedness--the nakedness that one feels on
the sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no attachments, no
accumulations. In one's own home it is as if little, innate
sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one
in an embrace, or take one along particular streets that seem
friendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling
is a very important part of life. I know it well, that have been for
so long a wanderer upon the face of public resorts. And one is too
polished up. Heaven knows I was never an untidy man. But the
feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her
morning bath, I stood upon the carefully swept steps of the
Englischer Hof, looking at the carefully arranged trees in tubs
upon the carefully arranged gravel whilst carefully arranged
people walked past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the carefully
calculated hour, the tall trees of the public gardens, going up to
the right; the reddish stone of the baths--or were they white
half-timber châlets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was
there so often. That will give you the measure of how much I was
in the landscape. I could find my way blindfolded to the hot
rooms, to the douche rooms, to the fountain in the centre of the
quadrangle where the rusty water gushes out. Yes, I could find my
way blindfolded. I know the exact distances. From the Hotel
Regina you took one hundred and eighty-seven paces, then,
turning sharp, left-handed, four hundred and twenty took you
straight down to the fountain. From the Englischer Hof, starting
on the sidewalk, it was ninety-seven paces and the same four
hundred and twenty, but turning lefthanded this time.
And now you understand that, having nothing in the world to
do--but nothing whatever! I fell into the habit of counting my
footsteps. I would walk with Florence to the baths. And, of course,
she entertained me with her conversation. It was, as I have said,
wonderful what she could make conversation out of. She walked
very lightly, and her hair was very nicely done, and she dressed
beautifully and very expensively. Of course she had money of her
own, but I shouldn't have minded. And yet you know I can't
remember a single one of her dresses. Or I can remember just one,
a very simple one of blue figured silk--a Chinese pattern--very full
in the skirts and broadening out over the shoulders. And her hair
was copper-coloured, and the heels of her shoes were exceedingly
high, so that she tripped upon the points of her toes. And when she
came to the door of the bathing place, and when it opened to
receive her, she would look back at me with a little coquettish
smile, so that her cheek appeared to be caressing her shoulder.
I seem to remember that, with that dress, she wore an immensely
broad Leghorn hat--like the Chapeau de Paille of Rubens, only
very white. The hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of
the same stuff as her dress. She knew how to give value to her
blue eyes. And round her neck would be some simple pink, coral
beads. And her complexion had a perfect clearness, a perfect
smoothness . . .
Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her, in that dress, in that
hat, looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very
blue--dark pebble blue . . .
And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of
the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I don't know. Anyhow, it
can't have been for me, for never, in all the years of her life, never
on any possible occasion, or in any other place did she so smile to
me, mockingly, invitingly. Ah, she was a riddle; but then, all other
women are riddles. And it occurs to me that some way back I
began a sentence that I have never finished . . . It was about the
feeling that I had when I stood on the steps of my hotel every
morning before starting out to fetch Florence back from the bath.
Natty, precise, well-brushed, conscious of being rather small
amongst the long English, the lank Americans, the rotund
Germans, and the obese Russian Jewesses, I should stand there,
tapping a cigarette on the outside of my case, surveying for a
moment the world in the sunlight. But a day was to come when I
was never to do it again alone. You can imagine, therefore, what
the coming of the Ashburnhams meant to me. I have forgotten the
aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the
dining-room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening--and on so
many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my
memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that
white room, festooned with papier-maché fruits and flowers; the
tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door
with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the
palm-tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter's feet;
the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came
in every evening--their air of earnestness as if they must go
through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of
sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their
meals--those things I shall not easily forget. And then, one
evening, in the twilight, I saw Edward Ashburnham lounge round
the screen into the room. The head waiter, a man with a face all
grey--in what subterranean nooks or corners do people cultivate
those absolutely grey complexions?--went with the timorous
patronage of these creatures towards him and held out a grey ear
to be whispered into. It was generally a disagreeable ordeal for
newcomers but Edward Ashburnham bore it like an Englishman
and a gentleman. I could see his lips form a word of three
syllables--remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice
these niceties--and immediately I knew that he must be Edward
Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House,
Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it because every evening just before
dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of
Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the little police
reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.
The head waiter piloted him immediately to a vacant table, three
away from my own--the table that the Grenfalls of Falls River,
N.J., had just vacated. It struck me that that was not a very nice
table for the newcomers, since the sunlight, low though it was,
shone straight down upon it, and the same idea seemed to come at
the same moment into Captain Ashburnham's head. His face
hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing
whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither
hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to
perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been
walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression
before and I never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence;
it was modesty and not modesty. His hair was fair, extraordinarily
ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the right; his
face was a light brick-red, perfectly uniform in tint up to the roots
of the hair itself; his yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush
and I verily believe that he had his black smoking jacket thickened
a little over the shoulder-blades so as to give himself the air of the
slightest possible stoop. It would be like him to do that; that was
the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits,
boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of
the chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading
power of number three shot before a charge of number four
powder . . . by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of anything
else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of
anything but these subjects. Oh, yes, once he told me that I could
buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in
Burlington Arcade than from my own people in New York. And I
have bought my ties from that firm ever since. Otherwise I should
not remember the name of the Burlington Arcade. I wonder what
it looks like. I have never seen it. I imagine it to be two immense
rows of pillars, like those of the Forum at Rome, with Edward
Ashburnham striding down between them. But it probably
isn't--the least like that. Once also he advised me to buy
Caledonian Deferred, since they were due to rise. And I did buy
them and they did rise. But of how he got the knowledge I haven't
the faintest idea. It seemed to drop out of the blue sky.
And that was absolutely all that I knew of him until a month
ago--that and the profusion of his cases, all of pigskin and
stamped with his initials, E. F. A. There were gun cases, and
collar cases, and shirt cases, and letter cases and cases each
containing four bottles of medicine; and hat cases and helmet
cases. It must have needed a whole herd of the Gadarene swine to
make up his outfit. And, if I ever penetrated into his private room
it would be to see him standing, with his coat and waistcoat off
and the immensely long line of his perfectly elegant trousers from
waist to boot heel. And he would have a slightly reflective air and
he would be just opening one kind of case and just closing
another.
Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all
there was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good
soldier. Yet, Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an
agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea.
How could he arouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody?
What did he even talk to them about--when they were under four
eyes? --Ah, well, suddenly, as if by a flash of inspiration, I know.
For all good soldiers are sentimentalists--all good soldiers of that
type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words,
courage, loyalty, honour, constancy. And I have given a wrong
impression of Edward Ashburnham if I have made you think that
literally never in the course of our nine years of intimacy did he
discuss what he would have called "the graver things." Even
before his final outburst to me, at times, very late at night, say, he
has blurted out something that gave an insight into the sentimental
view of the cosmos that was his. He would say how much the
society of a good woman could do towards redeeming you, and he
would say that constancy was the finest of the virtues. He said it
very stiffly, of course, but still as if the statement admitted of no
doubt.
Constancy! Isn't that the queer thought? And yet, I must add that
poor dear Edward was a great reader--he would pass hours lost in
novels of a sentimental type--novels in which typewriter girls
married Marquises and governesses Earls. And in his books, as a
rule, the course of true love ran as smooth as buttered honey. And
he was fond of poetry, of a certain type--and he could even read a
perfectly sad love story. I have seen his eyes filled with tears at
reading of a hopeless parting. And he loved, with a sentimental
yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble generally. . . .
So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle about to a
woman--with that and his sound common sense about martingales
and his--still sentimental--experiences as a county magistrate; and
with his intense, optimistic belief that the woman he was making
love to at the moment was the one he was destined, at last, to be
eternally constant to. . . . Well, I fancy he could put up a pretty
good deal of talk when there was no man around to make him feel
shy. And I was quite astonished, during his final burst out to
me--at the very end of things, when the poor girl was on her way
to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself and me
that he had never really cared for her--I was quite astonished to
observe how literary and how just his expressions were. He talked
like quite a good book--a book not in the least cheaply
sentimental. You see, I suppose he regarded me not so much as a
man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a solicitor. Anyhow, it
burst out of him on that horrible night. And then, next morning, he
took me over to the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm
and business-like way, he set to work to secure a verdict of not
guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his tenants, who had
been accused of murdering her baby. He spent two hundred
pounds on her defence . . . Well, that was Edward Ashburnham.
I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a
certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them
carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly
straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of
his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his
inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression--like a
mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that chap, coming
into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as
dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls. It was most
amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen
balls at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on
his shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves; and he
stands perfectly still and does nothing. Well, it was like that. He
had rather a rough, hoarse voice.
And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him,
with my back to the screen. And suddenly, I saw two distinct
expressions flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did
they do it, those unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For
the eyes themselves never moved, gazing over my shoulder
towards the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly
direct and perfectly unchanging. I suppose that the lids really must
have rounded themselves a little and perhaps the lips moved a
little too, as if he should be saying: "There you are, my dear." At
any rate, the expression was that of pride, of satisfaction, of the
possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon
the sunny fields of Branshaw and say: "All this is my land!"
And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder if
possible--hardy too. It was a measuring look; a challenging look.
Once when we were at Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo
match against the Bonner Hussaren I saw the same look come into
his eyes, balancing the possibilities, looking over the ground. The
German Captain, Count Baron Idigon von Lelöffel, was right up
by their goal posts, coming with the ball in an easy canter in that
tricky German fashion. The rest of the field were just anywhere. It
was only a scratch sort of affair. Ashburnham was quite close to
the rails not five yards from us and I heard him saying to himself:
"Might just be done!" And he did it. Goodness! he swung that
pony round with all its four legs spread out, like a cat dropping off
a roof. . . .
Well, it was just that look that I noticed in his eyes: "It might," I
seem even now to hear him muttering to himself, "just be done."
I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall, smiling brilliantly
and buoyant--Leonora. And, little and fair, and as radiant as the
track of sunlight along the sea--my wife.
That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment in a perfect
devil of a fix, and there he was, saying at the back of his mind: "It
might just be done." It was like a chap in the middle of the
eruption of a volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt
into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness?
Predestination? Who the devil knows?
Mrs Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more gaiety than I have
ever since known her to show. There are certain classes of English
people--the nicer ones when they have been to many spas, who
seem to make a point of becoming much more than usually
animated when they are introduced to my compatriots. I have
noticed this often. Of course, they must first have accepted the
Americans. But that once done, they seem to say to themselves:
"Hallo, these women are so bright. We aren't going to be outdone
in brightness." And for the time being they certainly aren't. But it
wears off. So it was with Leonora--at least until she noticed me.
She began, Leonora did--and perhaps it was that that gave me the
idea of a touch of insolence in her character, for she never
afterwards did any one single thing like it--she began by saying in
quite a loud voice and from quite a distance:
"Don't stop over by that stuffy old table, Teddy. Come and sit by
these nice people!"
And that was an extraordinary thing to say. Quite extraordinary. I
couldn't for the life of me refer to total strangers as nice people.
But, of course, she was taking a line of her own in which I at any
rate--and no one else in the room, for she too had taken the
trouble to read through the list of guests--counted any more than
so many clean, bull terriers. And she sat down rather brilliantly at
a vacant table, beside ours--one that was reserved for the
Guggenheimers. And she just sat absolutely deaf to the
remonstrances of the head waiter with his face like a grey ram's.
That poor chap was doing his steadfast duty too. He knew that the
Guggenheimers of Chicago, after they had stayed there a month
and had worried the poor life out of him, would give him two
dollars fifty and grumble at the tipping system. And he knew that
Teddy Ashburnham and his wife would give him no trouble
whatever except what the smiles of Leonora might cause in his
apparently unimpressionable bosom--though you never can tell
what may go on behind even a not quite spotless plastron! --And
every week Edward Ashburnham would give him a solid, sound,
golden English sovereign. Yet this stout fellow was intent on
saving that table for the Guggenheimers of Chicago. It ended in
Florence saying:
"Why shouldn't we all eat out of the same trough? --that's a nasty
New York saying. But I'm sure we're all nice quiet people and
there can be four seats at our table. It's round."
Then came, as it were, an appreciative gurgle from the Captain and
I was perfectly aware of a slight hesitation--a quick sharp motion
in Mrs Ashburnham, as if her horse had checked. But she put it at
the fence all right, rising from the seat she had taken and sitting
down opposite me, as it were, all in one motion. I never thought
that Leonora looked her best in evening dress. She seemed to get
it too clearly cut, there was no ruffling. She always affected black
and her shoulders were too classical. She seemed to stand out of
her corsage as a white marble bust might out of a black
Wedgwood vase. I don't know.
I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very cheerfully lay
down my life, what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I
never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex
instinct towards her. And I suppose--no I am certain that she never
had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I think it was those
white shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I looked at them
that, if ever I should press my lips upon them that they would be
slightly cold--not icily, not without a touch of human heat, but, as
they say of baths, with the chill off. I seemed to feel chilled at the
end of my lips when I looked at her . . .
No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue
tailor-made. Then her glorious hair wasn't deadened by her white
shoulders. Certain women's lines guide your eyes to their necks,
their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But Leonora's seemed to
conduct your gaze always to her wrist. And the wrist was at its
best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a gold
circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key to a
dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart
and her feelings.
Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for the first time, she
paid any attention to my existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet
deliberately, one long stare. Her eyes too were blue and dark and
the eyelids were so arched that they gave you the whole round of
the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance,
as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. I seemed to
perceive the swift questions chasing each other through the brain
that was behind them. I seemed to hear the brain ask and the eyes
answer with all the simpleness of a woman who was a good hand
at taking in qualities of a horse--as indeed she was. "Stands well;
has plenty of room for his oats behind the girth. Not so much in
the way of shoulders," and so on. And so her eyes asked: "Is this
man trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to play the
lover; is he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he, above
all, likely to babble about my affairs?"
And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost defensive
china blue orbs, there came a warmth, a tenderness, a friendly
recognition . . . oh, it was very charming and very touching--and
quite mortifying. It was the look of a mother to her son, of a sister
to her brother. It implied trust; it implied the want of any necessity
for barriers. By God, she looked at me as if I were an invalid--as
any kind woman may look at a poor chap in a bath chair. And,
yes, from that day forward she always treated me and not Florence
as if I were the invalid. Why, she would run after me with a rug
upon chilly days. I suppose, therefore, that her eyes had made a
favourable answer. Or, perhaps, it wasn't a favourable answer.
And then Florence said: "And so the whole round table is begun."
Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his throat; but
Leonora shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave.
And I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls. Avanti! . . .
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